Definition
A Latin term from the civil law meaning, at its most literal, "to write under" — that is, to write one's name beneath a document. In legal usage, subscribere carried three related but distinct senses: (1) the physical act of signing or underwriting a legal instrument by placing one's name at its foot; (2) the act of consenting or assenting to a matter, particularly in a formal proceeding; and (3) the act of joining with another party in a legal action, as where multiple complainants unite in bringing a single proceeding together.
The term is the Latin root from which the English legal terms "subscribe" and "subscription" directly descend.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To subscribe means to arrange to receive something regularly (a publication, service), to sign up, or to express agreement with a view or position.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "To write underneath; to sign with one's own hand; to give consent to something written, by signing one's name beneath it; also, to assent to."
The common meaning of subscribing to a magazine or service retains the root sense only faintly. The legal significance of subscribere — particularly its procedural meaning of joining a co-complainant in litigation — has no modern common counterpart and requires reference to civil law sources to understand fully.
Common Confusion
Burrill notes that some manuscripts of the Digest use adscriptione where others use subscriptione, indicating that the terms were not always cleanly distinguished in the source texts themselves. Researchers encountering either form in civil law materials should treat them as functionally interchangeable without assuming a meaningful doctrinal distinction unless context suggests otherwise.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Subscribere in crimen: The specific civil law phrase for participating or joining in a criminal accusation or proceeding — taking a share in the legal prosecution rather than merely consenting to it in the abstract.
Why It Matters in Research
Subscribere is a civil law term and will appear almost exclusively in materials drawing on Roman law, the Continental legal tradition, or early English equity sources influenced by civilian practice. It will not be found as a working term in common law pleading authorities.
Researchers using Burrill should note that his entry connects subscribere to the procedural concept of joining a querela — a complaint or accusation — with another party. This associative meaning (joinder in an action) is the one most likely to be misread by common law-trained researchers, who will instinctively reduce the word to its signature meaning alone and miss its procedural dimension.
The variance between subscriptione and adscriptione flagged by Burrill is a genuine manuscript-tradition issue in Digest scholarship. If you encounter adscriptione in a historical legal text and the context is procedural or consensual rather than relating to servile status (adscriptus = bound to the soil), the two terms may be running in parallel.
For researchers tracing the English law of subscription — the formal requirement that a party sign an instrument — subscribere is the etymological and conceptual starting point, but the English doctrine developed independently through statute and common law practice, not by direct transplantation of the civil law term.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is compact but precise. He correctly identifies the etymological components (sub + scribere), supplies the three functional meanings (physical signing, consent, joinder in action), and flags the manuscript variant adscriptione without overstating the distinction. The cross-reference to Calvinus's Lexicon Juridicum (Calv. Lex.) signals that Burrill is working from standard civilian lexicographic sources rather than independent analysis.
What Burrill does not address is the downstream influence of subscribere on equity practice in English courts, where civilian vocabulary was common, or the specific formalities that came to attach to subscription under English statute law. Those developments post-date the Roman sources on which Burrill draws and would require supplementation from treatise literature and statutory materials outside his dictionary.
No other source dictionaries in the present corpus carry an entry for this term.
Jurisdictional Note
As a Latin civil law term, subscribere has no jurisdiction-specific meaning in common law systems. Its significance in American or English legal research is primarily etymological and historical — it is the root of "subscribe" and "subscription" as those terms appear in contracts, wills, and corporate law, but the substantive rules governing subscription are creatures of domestic statute and case law, not of the Roman term itself.